Advocates of college football’s status quo often argue that the BCS system creates an in-season playoff structure. According to them, each and every game during the season matters because any one loss can ruin a team’s national championship hopes. However, last season exposed that contention as false: one BCS-conference team, Cincinnati, and two non-BCS conference teams were “left out in the cold.”

            To us, a playoff means that every team within the system has an opportunity to become champion. If the regular season of college football were a playoff, every team would at least have an opportunity to win a national championship.  A principal BCS flaw is that it lacks the flexibility for pollsters to consider bowl game performances. Instead, the pollsters’ influence is limited to determining what teams end up in the BCS title game as number one and number two at season’s end. Coaches’ Poll voters are then required to vote that game’s winner as their number one team. Prior to the BCS, no such voting requirement existed.

            For all its flaws, at least the “old bowl” system did exactly what it claimed: it matched talented teams in post-season exhibition games. The old bowl system did not parade itself around as a system to determine a national champion, as the BCS does now. Moreover, before the BCS, voters had flexibility to vote on a number one team after all games were played, rather than being locked into voting for one particular team.

            So what can we do to decide a national champion in college football? Many ideas have been floated—a “plus one” system, an eight-team playoff. However, we want to float an outside-the-box idea based on the concept of a regular season playoff system. We call it a “super conference” system.

            Essentially, a “super conference” system would combine college football’s major programs into four conferences of 16 teams, each subdivided into divisions of eight. Each conference would then play a title game to determine a conference championship. These four conference champions would then play in a four-team playoff to determine a national champion. By grouping all of the teams into “super conferences,” this system would afford 64 teams an equal opportunity at a national championship, rather than only a chosen few.  Teams would be regularly reevaluated, and after sustained underachievement, could be replaced within the “super conferences.” Such a reevaluation process has worked for years in the Premiership in European soccer.

            A “super conference” system would create a tangible, regular season playoff system where over half of the current teams in the Football Bowl Subdivision (“FBS”) could compete for a national title. Each of the teams would have a legitimate chance at the ultimate prize of a championship season, rather than the consolation prize of sitting on the outside looking in, like TCU, Boise State, and Cincinnati did last year.

The “super conference” proposal is still under development and is not without flaws. However, this article’s main purpose is to put forth an unconventional way to replace the existing BCS system. Hopefully with this unique proposal, a compromise acceptable to everyone could be found.